Post subject: Promoting TASVideos
Emulator Coder
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Over the past week, I've been noticing how horribly our site has been promoted. Primarily, even when searching for an exact phrase for one of our published movies, you'd rarely if ever see those movie pages appear in Google search results. I fixed our site internally so that our movie pages get promoted better. I also added some fixes to try to make our site appear as the source for our movies that end up on YouTube, DailyMotion and elsewhere. For movies published in the past few days, it is now much easier to find our movie pages in Google. But it will take them quite a while till they recrawl our older pages and register the new significance they've been given in contrast to submission pages or our movies hosted elsewhere. I've registered with all the major search engines to improve things, but I need your help too. If you have accounts on YouTube, DailyMotion, Archive.org or elsewhere, please make sure they link to movie pages. If you posted an encode of a submission linking to the submission page, once the movie is published, please update the link to the movie page. On your pages on these aforementioned sites, please don't link to pages on these other sites, only link to our movie page to serve as a hub to these other places you can see the same video. If the appropriate link doesn't appear on our movie page, please get one of our editors to add it. If you're doing a search on Google for one of our movies, and you're logged in, you're able to promote and demote links. Try to find the movie page for that movie and promote it to the top. Make sure movie pages appear before submission pages. When searching in general, be sure to click on our movie page, and try to avoid clicking on YouTube links or similar from Google searches. If you're reading a page on Wikipedia or some other wiki about a game, add a link to one of our movie pages for the game, and label it something like "Exciting video walkthrough" (which is usually appropriate, if not think of something else appropriate) of the game.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Post subject: Re: Promoting TASVideos
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Nach wrote:
If you're reading a page on Wikipedia or some other wiki about a game, add a link to one of our movie pages for the game, and label it something like "Exciting video walkthrough" (which is usually appropriate, if not think of something else appropriate) of the game.
I don't recommend this. It's all too easy on Wikipedia for one of the moderators to get a grudge against some person or group and just start mass-reverting any changes that look like they'd benefit that group. And you can't fight the moderator cabal; it appears to be composed entirely of people who have way more time than you do. There are some situations where adding links could be warranted, though. For example, if there was a discussion of glitches in Mario 64, then linking to the TAS would give a good demonstration. But as a general rule, not every game article needs a link to the corresponding TAS.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Post subject: Re: Promoting TASVideos
Emulator Coder
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Derakon wrote:
Nach wrote:
If you're reading a page on Wikipedia or some other wiki about a game, add a link to one of our movie pages for the game, and label it something like "Exciting video walkthrough" (which is usually appropriate, if not think of something else appropriate) of the game.
I don't recommend this. It's all too easy on Wikipedia for one of the moderators to get a grudge against some person or group and just start mass-reverting any changes that look like they'd benefit that group.
It's hard to "mass revert" changes which are done by many different people. Also, this isn't limited to Wikipedia.
Derakon wrote:
And you can't fight the moderator cabal; it appears to be composed entirely of people who have way more time than you do.
Indeed. Which is why promoting TASVideos has to be more than just me doing it, everyone has to do it.
Derakon wrote:
There are some situations where adding links could be warranted, though. For example, if there was a discussion of glitches in Mario 64, then linking to the TAS would give a good demonstration. But as a general rule, not every game article needs a link to the corresponding TAS.
As I said above, only use something appropriate. The fact however is we do provide complete video walkthroughs that an average player can more or less follow for many games.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Post subject: Interviews at Gamer's Global
adelikat
He/Him
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3578)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
Recently both Lord Tom and I were interviewed by Gamer's Global. He had an interview about his Super Mario Bros 3 TAS, and I had an interview about TASVideos and administrating the site/community. Adelikat Interview English version Lord Tom's interview English version
It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects
Patashu
He/Him
Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 4045
Encodes on youtube should be tagged with as many terms related to the game itself, to TASing, to speedrunning, to glitching, etc as one can come up with, to maximize the chance they'll come up in a relevant search. For instance, you might tag a TAS with alternative names and spellings for the game, the platform it's on, what company made the game, potentially other games closely related to that game, generic terms like 'tool assisted speedrun speed run beaten glitch glitchy glitched zipping'... Unless there's evidence that adding too many tags lowers the 'power' of each tag?
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
I usually follow a Game name (Including categories), 'TAS Tool Assisted Speedrun', and Video game console name and possible acronyms scheme. To me, it's expansive without being obnoxious about it... I tend to be a bit, for the lack of better term, offended when someone overtags their videos.
Post subject: Re: Interviews at Gamer's Global
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
adelikat wrote:
Recently both Lord Tom and I were interviewed by Gamer's Global. He had an interview about his Super Mario Bros 3 TAS, and I had an interview about TASVideos and administrating the site/community.
I like those interviews. They are easy to understand and straight to the point, without going too much into technical details, but still providing interesting tidbits of information.
Skilled player (1653)
Joined: 11/15/2004
Posts: 2202
Location: Killjoy
Bagdadsoftware: To that end: Is TASVideos.org actively promoting TAS at events like MAGFest or PAX or do you keep more to yourself?
These are really cool ideas. Not sure what we would do - I know SDA does a marathon for MAGFest, and has a yearly video at PAX...
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
Joined: 5/5/2010
Posts: 1
Location: Germany
Personally I would be interested in a panel where someone produces a short TAS (just a small section of a game or something) live on stage, explaining stuff and everything while doing it. But I guess that would be a little bit too much to ask for.
Player (118)
Joined: 5/13/2009
Posts: 700
Location: suffern, ny
I don't know, I remember times searching for emulators, and the Google results came to our emulator resources page. The site has grown a lot since i came here about a year ago. We get new people submitting new TASes and asking more and more questions all of the time. I don't know what we are doing, but we must be doing SOMETHING right. And the Newbie forum keeps getting filled with new posts and suggestions. A lot of people Lurk or don't submit TASes, and find other ways to submit to the community. I remember before working on Maui Mallard, I browsed the forums, giving feed back on games, making lots of suggestions, and watching WIPs. We should push all sides of the process from choosing a game to the completion.
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Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
For promotions: it wouldn't be unreasonable to whip up a demo reel (like this one but longer), and hand-pick a few representative TASes to show like other groups might show movies or TV shows at cons. Another possibility would be having a TASer give a guided walkthrough of the TAS they made by playing it back in an emulator, and stepping through various bits frame-by-frame with their tools enabled (e.g. memory watch, specialized Lua scripts, etc.) to highlight how a glitch works or how close the hitboxes come or whatever. I don't think that watching someone make a TAS in realtime would be particularly interesting, but I could be wrong.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Player (146)
Joined: 7/16/2009
Posts: 686
If you're going to be present on something like MAGfest, I think your best bet would be something of a TAS-workshop. You'd set up a bunch of computers and a few experienced TASers (in some of the more well-known games) and let people make their own runs. Of course, when there's nobody doing it, you could use the same computers do demonstrate the process or play some showcases/TASes for people to view. One of the main misconceptions about TASing is that we modify the game in order to make our exploits possible (I was amazed by how many people thought Ryu had modified Brain Age to accept all answers as correct). If people could watch a TAS play back and stop it at any given time to resume playing, we could easily show them that this is not the case. I'd love to help out at such an event, but unfortunately I' but a poor student living in the Netherlands, so it's quite unlikely I'll be capable of going abroad, and it's even more unlikely that such an event will happen anywhere near.
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
That's another thought -- set up a TAS playback "kiosk" computer that's set up to automatically play through several TASes, with the user having access to frame advance, a toggle to enable useful Lua information, and a few neat savestates. This would probably require some programming work, though.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Joined: 7/11/2016
Posts: 3
Hey guys. I have to say I really appreciate the work and effort you guys put forth. I originally stumbled upon your work when browsing archive.org for old game trailers. I watched a few and I was brought to a whole new and wondrous world of gaming. One where everything falls into place perfectly. Being a gamer i checked out the site itself and saw so many more wonderful videos. I knew this place had to seen by more people. I browsed through the site and came across the "about" [ page. I noticed that the page granted people permission to be able to redistribute videos from the site provided that clear attribution is given, the video content is not modified (including pointers to the site at the start), and that it be clearly labelled as a tool-assisted speedrun. Since it appeared that blanket permission was given to redictribute the videos on the site I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to share and get more attention to the community. Sadly, theenglishman has informed me that I was mistaken and that is not the case and people are actually permitted to redistribute these works of art. I'm sorry for any trouble I have caused you. I will remove what I have shared shortly (by next Sunday at the latest) but I wanted you to be aware of the language on the "about" section. It needs to be cleared up or otherwise removed in order to prevent future misunderstandings. TLDR I screwed up, but please fix the http://tasvideos.org/WelcomeToTASVideos.html page Redistribution section to prevent the mistake I made in the future and either remove it entirely or specify only which ways they can be shared and what further restrictions are needed. Thanks.
Spikestuff
They/Them
Editor, Publisher, Expert player (2666)
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6451
Location: The land down under.
Since your comment is missing some points, and your tl;dr is missing the main point you put forth in the main statement. Everything explained in the redistribution is fine as it is. So, I'll ask a question back. What's the point of redistributing something when majority is already available on the Main YouTube Channel of TASVideos? And that the older TASes are slowly making their way there through re-encodes. If it was dailymotion, vimeo or some other non-YouTube platform you could've been fine in redistributing the content, as it most likely wouldn't have been distributed there.
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The link to youtube comment is broken for me, what was there?
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Joined: 7/11/2016
Posts: 3
Spikestuff wrote:
So, I'll ask a question back. What's the point of redistributing something when majority is already available on the Main YouTube Channel of TASVideos? And that the older TASes are slowly making their way there through re-encodes.
That is a good point. Diversifying would probably be more productive. Thanks!
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I edited the section in WelcomeToTASVideos to reflect our policies better (and commented on youtube).
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Joined: 7/11/2016
Posts: 3
Thank you very much for helping to clarify. Now since theenglishman has requested that I remove his video I still will do so even though I am under no obligation to. I know you guys put a TON of effort into even a single minute of a TAS so I have to respect such requests on a personal level.